People: Nov. 17, 1961

Where once pastel mansions had gilded green canyons, a snaggle-toothed rubble of chimneys now disfigured the Mecca of conspicuous consumption. Raging through the Los Angeles suburbs of Bel Air and Brentwood, a gale-whipped brush fire—the worst in Southern California’s history —had sent up in Argenta-mink smoke 447 homes (bottom price: $50,000), left behind more than $24 million in insurance claims, and the flossiest refugees since the Russian Revolution. Among the homeless were Actor Cliff Robertson, Joan Fontaine, Comedian Arnold Stang, Bandleader Orrin Tucker. All that was left of Burt Lancaster’s $500,000 estate was a mailbox, an exercise bicycle and a smoldering set of barbells. Poking through his own $100,000 ruins, Joe E. Brown uncovered only some oddments and the dress sword of his son—an Army Air Force captain killed during World War II. Out of $500,000 worth of ashes composed in part of a Picasso etching, a $7,000 soup tureen and her private Tiffany’s, Zsa Zsa Gabor salvaged little more than sketches of two former husbands and some love letters (“They were hotter than the fire”). Like everything else in Southern California, reactions to the high-caste holocaust constituted a weird and wonderful display of human idiosyncrasies. Bandleader Billy Vaughn was among the 150 fire fighters injured (none of them seriously). Nobel Prizewinning Chemist Willard Libby came home to find the roof of his much-publicized $30 fallout shelter reduced to coals, stubbornly insisted: “I have more faith than ever in the shelter.” Kim Novak, artfully decked out in slacks, soot and no bra, rushed back from her studio during the fire to grab up a garden hose, but was unabashedly just as concerned with soaking up publicity as with soaking down her house. Her $200,000 manse survived unharmed, as did the nearby rented quarters of the Richard M. Nixons. But at the height of the fire the former Vice President, not taking any chances, first evacuated the manuscript of his memoirs and a taped account of his Moscow “kitchen debate” with Khrushchev, later hustled back with Wife Pat to retrieve some personal possessions. Sighed Nixon after the event: “I have seen trouble all over the world, but nothing like this.”

After three years devoted to his avowed magnum opus—a double cycle of 14 one-act plays—Author Thornton (Our Town) Wilder, 64, delivered a progress report. The new plays, he said, dealt only in universals—”I am not interested in such ephemeral subjects as the adulteries of dentists”—and three of them, entitled Infancy, Childhood and Someone from Assisi, would open off Broadway next month. As for the remaining eleven, said Wilder, “some are on the stove, some are in the oven, and some are in the wastebasket.” When all 14 were finally fully baked, then what? “After I complete these plays,” declared the three-time Pulitzer prizewinner, “I’m retiring from life.”

The week’s casualty list on the New Frontier warranted no Purple Hearts, but a pair of scarlet faces. While taxiing out of Washington’s National Airport at the controls of a Government-owned Grumman Gulfstream, Federal Aviation Agency Administrator Najeeb Halaby, 45, a former Navy jet jockey, sideswiped a United Air Lines Viscount, causing minor wing damage to both craft. The same day, Navy Secretary John Connolly, 44, a beribboned World War II carrier officer, was briefly mothballed in an Austin hospital for repairs to a gash over his left eye inflicted by a University of Texas Naval R.O.T.C. cadet who unexpectedly snapped his rifle to “port arms” during a Secretarial inspection.

Ringing out over the babble of mutual admiration at a London dinner celebrating the 25th anniversary of British television came a loud cry of dissent. For him, groused Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, 67, TV’s “hot, pitiless, probing eye” had made life “almost impossible.” Explained Supermac: “You get off a plane after 14 hours wanting only a shave and a bath. But, oh no. Within minutes you are cornered. Arc lights in your eyes, cameras whizzing. You put up your hand to shade your eyes, and next day there you are looking weary and old and worried.” Busy as he is, added Macmillan, he himself never watches the idiot box, not even to check on his own performances. “But I am spared nothing. My family are numerous—and candid.”

In an impassioned fight talk to the Syracuse Rotary Club, Eastern Air Lines Board Chairman Eddie Rickenbacker, 71, proposed that the U.S. sever all ties with Russia and the “socalled neutrals,” and get out of the U.N. Snapped the World War I fighter ace: “We have everything to gain and nothing to lose but their diplomatic and cultural spies.” Rickenbacker also called for resumption of U.S. nuclear testing, because “only nuclear weapons give us any chance” against the “diabolical Mongolian philosophy called Communism . . . From all indications, we are heading toward an ultimate surrender. For God’s sake, let’s fight and die before the final enslavement.”

When Yuri Gagarin, 27, took off on his round-the-earth business trip of last April, one of the last people to know was his wife Valentina, who had just given birth to their second daughter. Since then, as if to compensate, Yuri has spent as much time as possible practicing togetherness in the Gagarins’ newly acquired three-room Moscow flat. Among his favorite family chores: teaching eight-month-old Galya how to walk.

After belaboring the Democrats all fall, Grand Old Partisan Dwight Eisenhower enjoyed a moment of truce. After accepting his first semi-official assignment from his White House successor—the board chairmanship of the paragovern-mental People-to-People program—Eisenhower broke some personal cold-war ice with a “very nice” call on Harry S. Truman. Ike’s secretly arranged, hatchet-burying tour of the Truman Library at Independence, Mo. (and a private 15-minute chat) marked the first time since November 1952 that the two ex-Presidents had exchanged more than coldly formal greetings. Judging by the photographs, the relationship had changed from cold to awkward.

Although born with a silver riding crop in his mouth in the proper Bostonian resort of Nahant. Mass.. Author Cleveland (Who Killed Society?) Amory has always preferred to hound his thoroughbred friends rather than to hunt with them. Last week, his blue blood aboil over an annual North Carolina American Legion rabbit hunt in which the rabbits are beaten to death with sticks and stones. Amory took to NBC television to proclaim the organization of a Hunt-the-Hunters Club. Concluding that “halfway measures are simply not enough (all of us of course, applaud hunting accidents, and there has been a nice healthy increase).” the H.T.H.C.’s founder rallied his followers with the inspirational cry: “If you can’t play a sport, shoot one.” But to reassure any “bleeding hearts” and “people lovers” in the audience. Amory made it clear that all he had in mind was “intelligent conservation” of the hunting population and promised that in the process of “trimming the herd” there would be absolutely “no potshots at hunters within city limits or in parked cars or in the dating season.”